Not a single day goes by where I judge and hate myself for being a sinner. Where does this sin come from? It was taught to me when I was a child. So, who taught me this sin? well it was directly taught to me by my parents, but they couldn't have done it without the support of the community (donations), government (tax breaks and grants), and other charitable funds (grants). So who taught me this sin? Every one around me. Whats worse these same people (every single one of us) then force me through threat of abuse, rape, violence, and even death (prison) to finically support (taxes) these child abusers. We are horrible people.

I am the son of a preacher man, and I can't teach you anything. Education, whats that? Going to two different fundamentalist Christian schools in different cities before thirteen. The first school (looking back it was more like a christian commune) I have only few memories of, mostly of my sin. One that sticks out was when I was hanging under the monkey bars and another Christian kid was on top, he pulled my fingers of the bars one by one until I feel. I feel in such a way that I shattered my elbow, six weeks in a cast, six months in a claw, worst case I would not be able to use my arm again... Apart from being a bit deformed my arm is fine, I do not blame the kid (he would not have known what would happen), what stands out in my memory is that no one believed me when I told them what he had done, not one teacher, not even my parents.

The second school wasn't much better, in fact it was worse. I was the only boy my age (whats important about social development?). We were used to put on plays and talks in public places, in order to spread the religion. Religion was more than what where was taught in their text books, it is taught as the very life force running through our veins, that without it you are scum. I remember a few things from there….. Teacher once asked us to draw a tree. I have always been pretty artistic without really being exceptional, but as it was I could draw a good tree for my age. Some of the other students saw my drawing and asked me to help with theirs. Being taught to give without question, and help my few man, the charity of Jesus, I helped them with there drawings. I remember I help with the teachings of Jesus in mind and with absolute innocence of heart. We handed our drawings in to be marked… What would Jesus do? I know what the teacher did. He singled out my drawing and the drawings of the students I had help with, he failed us all. On top of that (Jesus was still pissed at me for helping with the drawings I guess) he then held my picture up and started mocking it, he pointed to a feature I had drawn on the tree (at the time I couldn't name it, but I knew I had seen it on the tree I was drawing) "whats that, I've never seen one of those on a tree", it felt like I had insulted the guy in some way, he was angry and I didn't know why, I felt to cause this much hate I must have done something really bad, maybe I had drawn a hallucination I had seen, and he was trying to correct me, what have I done to this man of God….. I knew it was my fault. I know you want to know what I was drawing, a knot, caused by a branch being taken off and the bark growing over the cut. I feel sorry for this man and for all our children, for this man was able to pass through teachers college, and became approved the Ministry for Education, yet an eleven year old boy was more observant of the real world than he will ever be. Plus I kind of got him back later that year I felt really sick and asked to go to the bathroom, he didn't believe me, I held it in for as long as I could but just couldn't hold back any more…. I power chucked all over the carpet and main door as I was trying to rush myself out of class… He had to clean it up.

It was about this time that I started to feel like something was wrong. What was wrong? It must be sin, it must be me, everyone else is alright… Not knowing what was wrong, thinking I was wrong, and not knowing who to trust, even though I though I was wrong (I am sin) I felt some how that the cause was the grown ups, but again no one else was feeling like this, it's probably just my sin, I better keep quite, can't let the grown ups know I am sin. Twelve years old, some things wrong, oh no my home works not done, why didn't I do my home work, I always do, I am such a sinner. Oh no the teacher's coming, quick you don't want to get into trouble, make something up. "My home work is in my bag, I will have to go to the changing room to get it". In the changing room, what do I do, what do I do. i check my bag hopping God had done me a solid, dam!… If only I wasn't such a sinner, maybe He would have helped me out, I am going to be in so much trouble, I am such a sinner… Run…… Don't look back, keep running. Made it across the city, I find myself in a park down the road from home. I can't go home, what do I do… Wait… I know, i'll go home once its dark and my brothers and sister are asleep, and least then they won't have to see my punishment, who knows maybe they will have calmed down by then and they will let me off, miracles are supposed to happen, "… there you are! Come with me." crap, mum… "Why did you do it" he shouted as I cowered on the corner of my bed. I don't say a thing, from my past experience I had learnt that if I tell my sin the punishment is much worse….. Slap goes the leather across my naked lower back. Don't ever tell what you have done, they can't be trusted, you don't know why, but if you tell them they will use it to punish you more… Slap, Slap, Slap, don't say a word, you are on your own… Slap, Slap.

You have done it, you made it to thirteen. You have never meet anyone who wasn't a Christian, you know the world is full evil, there is no reality beyond the Bible, it alone is truth. So thirteen, we shall now take you from your school of Christian thirty and dump you in a secular school of 1200 for high school… with such a great head start in life (I know the bible, what more could anyone need to know) I was bound to do well on my highway to hell… But those are other stories.

I was brought up an Anglican by normal parents who go to church every Sunday but don't necessarily feel the need to give up everything for God - they just have their hour on Sunday morning and that's that. I should have stayed that way!

I was a waitress at a restaurant opposite a pentecostal church. I say pentecostal, because that's what they were. If you ask them though, they will say non-denominational. At the time I was going through quite a hard time emotionally and had been treated very badly by lots of guys.

A cute guy (lets call him *Ben*) and his friend kept coming in and talking to me about coming along to the church, eventually I gave in. They told me it was a sign from God that I came.

The cute guy and I got closer and people kept telling me that a Christian man would never break my heart and would always be loyal. The fact he was preaching no sex before marriage to me and how he was 24 and had never had a girlfriend cos God hadn't told him who to marry yet appealed to me with my bad-boy history.

I ended up "getting saved" and "filled with the spirit". People would fall over when people prayed for them and I just used to pretend, the truth was I wanted so badly to feel what they were feeling.

People would speak in tongues. They told me I was able to do it too. I couldn't. Luckily I was a language student and am good with words so I was able to make up my own "tongues" that was a mixture of all the other peoples ones around me. No one knew. After a while I began to kid myself that I really was speaking in tongues, and I eventually started to believe it.

*Ben* and I started a relationship but it wasn't as I expected. I wasn't allowed to go clubbing with my uni friends without him making me feel really guilty - even if I didn't drink a drop of alcohol. He hated me wearing skirts and heels in case other men stared at me. Very noble, but if guys are gonna look at my arse they don't care if I have a skirt or anything!

*Ben* made me all kinds of promises. He was going to propose when I came back from my semester abroad, he couldn't wait to spend his whole life with me, God had TOLD HIM that he was to marry me. All the things a girl wants to hear.

So when he mercilessly dumped me with only 6 weeks to go of my semester abroad... naturally you can imagine the heartbreak! Not only this but the rest of my "brothers and sisters" from the church had all promised to be there for me during my time away from home, and I emailed several people to ask for advice/prayer/comfort during this hard time. How many people got back to me? None.

*Ben*'s grandfather founded that church. Whilst I was his girlfriend I had all the friends in the world. As soon as he got rid of me people just stopped caring!!!

I stopped going over time but then and only then did people start texting me. "Where were you Sunday?! Why didn't you come to church?!" I'd already decided that I'd made a huge mistake and that God didn't exist or if he did, didn't keep his promises. Because if he did, I'd be married by now.

When I officially left I got a plague of emails from the elders. I explained that I didn't fit in and that there was a problem with cliques in the church, and that no one was there for me during the hard times - only when they realised they were about to lose a member. I got no reply (surprise surprise!)

I remembered that I'd made up tongues and that I'd pretended to fall over like everyone else... and I wonder if they all make it up too? To fit in? To have a sense of belonging? Who knows. All I can say is get out of there asap!

Arecent article in this website criticized Annhiliationism specifically because it assumes that God’s divine retribution on people are unjust, and from there the author of the article made an analogy between God’s divine retribution and Hitler’s holocaust. While the analogy, indubitably, conveys a strong rhetorical and moral appeal, I personally believe that Annhiliationism has other serious flaws that must be addressed. Before I do this, however, I want to explain Annhiliationism in contrast to another position that believes in the eternal punishment, which I would call Eternalism. After I explain the theological differences, and the brief background context of those positions, I am going to criticize Annihiliationism by arguing that while it does avoid some of the moral problems of Eternalism (namely, infinite duration of punishment for a finite crime), it fails to avoid another moral problem of Eternalism which is the kinds of actions that are culpable for eternal death.

Annhiliationism is the theological position of Divine Retribution which believes that hell is a temporary process which annihilates the unrepentant sinner rather than punishing it through eternal torment. Theological Eternalism, on the other hand, believes that the person is being punished for infinite duration. Eternalism, however, might vary in what kind of punishment is being employed unto the unrepentant sinner: eternal alienation which only involves an existential, spiritual, and emotional suffering whereas the traditional eternal punishment involves a physical torment.

There are two major reasons why proponents of Annhiliationism support it. First, the biblical and linguistic reason is the argument which asserts that the term “forever” in the book of revelation has two distinct meanings: the first being the literal and eternal punishment, while the last conveys the meaning “until it is done”. This argument implies that the term “forever” has been mistranslated to the literal meaning of forever. Another supporting argument for this one cited texts that implies that the divine punishment is temporary i.e. "That servant who knows his master's will and does not get ready or does not do what his master wants will be beaten with many blows. But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows.” (Luke 12:47-48).

The second reason, however, is equally essential: Annihilationist argue that the deep flaw in Eternalism is that eternal punishment seems incompatible with God’s benevolence and justice. To punish a finite act of sin with an infinite duration of torture is unjust, since justice strives not only to punish sin but also to enforce a proportionate punishment that fits with the respective finite sin. Also, to impose infinite suffering, which is unbearable for a finite creature, is intuitively malevolent and malicious for a benevolent being. These are the common criticisms that Annihilationist has against Eternalism.

The Annihilationist’s position is theologically and morally appealing since it discards eternal punishment in favor of a temporary finite punishment proportionate to finite sinful acts. Such discarding is not only morally appealing, but also theologically appealing since it seems intuitively consistent with the notion of Justice and Benevolence which predicates on God as his attributes. However this is where I would disagree with the Annihilationist position, which is what I am going to address.

Imposing death penalty on sins such as stealing, adultery, lying, cheating, etc. is not sensible Annhiliationism has successfully avoided a certain problem that Eternalism has, namely that of eternal torment which involves infinite punishment on finite transgression. However it argues that the temporal/finite process of punishment, along with death, is proportionate and just. This is the specific premise that I disagree with. I do not disagree with the idea of temporal finite process of punishment, but I do strongly disagree with the aspect that inevitably involves death. In other words, God’s divine punishment sounds too similar to the death penalty of Medieval Europe, Islamic Sub Saharan Sharia law, and other death penalties commonly found in societies with theocratic judicial system. In these societies (though not all of them) death as a punishment is imposed on crimes such as apostasy, adultery, and stealing (though some societies cut off hands instead).

In our democratic society, where we have freedom of religion and freedom from religion, we respect people’s beliefs enough to tolerate deviation from religious norms. We do not coerce against those who disbelieve or leave their religious community, since this would violate the fundamental rights to belief and opinion. Also we do not impose death penalties on adultery, stealing, cheating, and other vices for a certain reason: Adultery is the violation of marriage contract, Stealing is the violation of ownership, Lying is the violation of trust, etc.; however none of these vices are not a legal violation of life, which Murder or Homicide fits in. We impose death penalty only on crimes that consists in the violation of life, but not the violation of marriage contract, ownership, and other duties, because none of these violations sensibly corresponds the punishment of death penalty.

Many societies impose death penalty mostly on crimes of homicide since homicide is the violation of life. I am not arguing for capital punishment, however, but I am arguing that some societies that do accept capital punishment usually impose death penalty mostly on those who allegedly committed homicide. The reason is clear, since homicide is the violation of life which deserves death penalty, not stealing, adultery, lying, and disbelief.

Even though Divine Punishment, in the Annihilationist view, would be temporary, it still begs the question as to whether the crimes being punished are really crimes and crimes that really deserves death. A Christian might point out that “All sin leads to death” but this only goes in circles because the assertion merely repeats the assumption that all crimes deserves death, but never providing justification or reasons why it does deserve death. But one of the basic perquisite for damnation (or death) is disbelief in God and the existence of God (hence Christ’s salvation), but the problem seems clear to us skeptics and non-believers (agnostics and atheists); does a lack or rejection of belief (whether true or not) deserve death in spite of other positive virtues? Does a faithful husband and loving father, who is an Atheist (or Agnostic), deserve death simply because he lacks the belief?

Annhiliationism, then, still faces the similar problem that Eternalism faces: Divine punishment on disbelief on the basis of evidence is unfair, and imposing death penalty on sins such as stealing, adultery, lying, cheating, etc. is not sensible since they do not violate the right to life; such indiscriminant death penalty reduces all sins as equally deserving death, when in fact it is our moral intuition that all crimes are different, hence requiring different consequences. Eternalism similarly faces this problem in that it reduces all crimes as equal deserving eternal punishment; the only difference is that Annihilationist believes all sins deserve death.

The Bible contains story after story involving god demanding worship and threatening – intentionally invoking fear in - those who might not worship him. Clearly, there is a very important lesson concerning fear that we should learn from the Bible.

The following are just a very few of the thousands of passages where god brandishes fear among the people:

Malachi 2:3: “Because of you I will rebuke your descendants; I will smear on your faces the dung from your festival sacrifices, and you will be carried off with it.”

Deut. 6:14-15: Ye shall not go after other gods, of the gods of the people which are round about you; (For the LORD thy God is a jealous God among you) lest the anger of the LORD thy God be kindled against thee, and destroy thee from off the face of the earth.”

Ex 34:6-7: “And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed . . . that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.”

(This is similar to what we would expect from the lowest Mafia scum, “Do as I say or I’ll be coming after your kids and their kids.” This pretty much ensures that no one will stand up to this god. The hero might be willing to accept his own destruction, but very, very few would sacrifice their children, if there were any way to avoid it. Threatening someone’s children is about as low and as morally reprehensible as one can get, isn’t it?)

(Matt. 10:28): And, lastly, the Prince of Peace says, “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”

If there is a god who truly loves us, as the Bible also claims, then why would he primarily teach through fear? Isn’t this the modus operandi of brutal dictators and other thugs? Why would someone who loves you want you to fear him? I was always very careful to avoid making my wife or children fear me, because a fearful person is an unhappy person. Because I loved them, I did not want them to be unhappy. I didn’t want them to fear me, but to love and respect me. I didn’t want to frighten my children about life, but to teach them, the best I could, about how to live a good life, a moral life, a life they could be happy in and proud of. Shouldn’t the wisest and most powerful ”father” in the whole universe have been able to find a way to do this for his children, instead of just scaring the hell out of us?

Why does the god of the Bible sound like a crude bully? Not a leader who seeks to earn respect, but one who demands it, threateningly? Could this be because this god was described by primitive men in a brutal age, an age of kings and emperors who commonly ruled by fear? Would the truly wise and enlightened king or emperor who really loved his people rule through fear, or would he seek to gain their respect, praise, and willing obedience by doing good things for them and showing them how much he cared?

Why does the god of the Bible sound like a crude bully? Not a leader who seeks to earn respect, but one who demands it, threateningly? Now, please, don’t tell me Bible-god’s choice to rule by fear doesn’t have to make sense to me. That’s just stupid. The MINIMUM REQUIREMENT for believability of any god should be whether it makes sense to us. How else are we to disqualify the Flying Spaghetti Monster or Ganesh, the Hindu god with the head of an elephant? Reason has led us out of the caves and into the space age; from ignorance and superstition to science, philosophy, democracy, and ethics, while faith has led people by the billions into false religions like Hinduism, Islam, Zoroastrianism and thousands of others. Reason clearly has the better track record, as any real god would surely know. If Bible-god isn’t REASON-able, he will be shunned by billions who will follow other religions or none. And the proof of this is already on the ground today, all over the world. Could a real god be so stupid as to not understand this?

I believe the lesson we should learn from the heavy use of fear by Bible-god is that it was written by superstitious men, out of their own heads and legends, based on their own experiences living in a brutal and barbaric ancient world. No rational, compassionate and loving god would choose to rule by fear anymore than I, a decent man, would choose to rule my family by fear. I think it just makes sense that the Bible was written by primitive, fearful men, who themselves were ruled by despotic and cruel kings and emperors, and in no way represents the revelations of a real god.

God believers live in the world without actually seeing it, because "this world" is interpreted through the lens of superstition. There are standard answers when beliefs car-crash into reality: "We can't question the wisdom of our god, there’s a higher purpose in this; There's a reason for everything and we can't know it; It happened to teach us a lesson, like, to be humble." And, one of my favorites, "Someday, we'll know." It’s a regular diet of junk food for the soul they consume.

Blame that last "explanation” on the self-conflicted St. Paul, who wrote of humans experiencing the world as, "We now see through a glass darkly." But, in Paul’s view, after the believer is dead, everything will be revealed. THEN believers will completely understand all the good, bad and indifferent explanations about life! In other words, THEY shall be as gods (whoops!). Wait until after they're dead? Sure, that makes it easy, don't trouble your mind. Don’t try to cure AIDS or cancer, or try to understand and deal with all the other unnecessary sufferings of mankind now. Don't trouble yourself to be sensitive about these things; they're in "the hands of god," and you'll understand later. Now, THAT'S Novocain for the mind.

The “clarity" of belief of the faithful is the clarity of "in vino veritas," looking through the wine glass in a drunken stupor. Yeah, it all makes sense when you see things soused. So, your friend is dying of cancer, children are suffering and dying of preventable diseases, and a tsunami drowns thousands, but "god has a plan," or "They're in a better place now." "Someday we’ll understand." Are they listening to themselves?

There may be an explanation why the faithful don't think much about what they believe. Maybe you have heard that believers go through life with blinders on, but that doesn’t sound quite right. After all, blinders force an animal to look straight ahead, without side distractions, but the path ahead is 20/20.

This is an example not of the blind leading the blind so much as the blurry-eyed leading each other, and accepting the same distorting, muddled "vision." Think about that "seeing through darkly" thing; darkly, as in distorted, smeared, dirty. That’s dogma, where nothing can be seen clearly with theological prescriptions. Now it makes sense why believers keep bumping into what should be clear and obvious. This is an example not of the blind leading the blind so much as the blurry-eyed leading each other, and accepting the same distorting, muddled "vision."

Give a believer a pair of the clean, crystal-clear glasses of reality, and the brightness is too much, too sharp, the colors too bright. The believer reacts like a hearing-impaired person (like me), when first reacting to a digital hearing aid. Hearing impairment is a condition one becomes accustomed to over time as a part of life; one gets used to hearing only parts of sentences, to not hearing the highs and lows of music's delights, and the colors of speech. When such people first try on a hearing aid, there's a sudden realization of just how much they've been missing, they are overwhelmed by the “noise,” and many throw their hearing aids in the dresser drawer because they make the world too loud and uncomfortable.

The lesson here is that maybe this is why believers don't get it. They live with blurred vision, even choosing it. They don’t how the real world works because they can’t see it clearly, and don’t want to, because the reality is too bright and clear and uncomfortable. Religious distortion is their security blanket. It’s just too scary to come out from under it and into the light.

How sad to approach the world with a completely unnecessary handicap and be missing so much! Living with the belief that one must die in order to “understand,” is to waste one’s life, the only life we have. Carl Sagan’s widow said, “He did not want to believe. He wanted to understand.” And he understood much, and passed it on.

Those who have taken those dirty, distorting glasses off, and kept them off, understand.

From a young age my parents always took me to church. Eventually my dad stopped going because he simply didn't like it. Soon after that my mom stopped going, and it was always because of this reason or that reason, and so my sister and I stopped attending service.

About a year after that, when I was eight and my sister was seven, we were playing in the apartment complex when two missionaries came up to us. We were excited by the idea of going back to church, and so we went. We took the church bus every Sunday, enjoying service, enjoying our teachers, and enjoying our friends. I, for one, never felt a stronger sense of belonging, up to that point, than from attending church.

When I was ten, my dad took me to get my ear pierced, and I had a little alien earring, and thought it was the neatest thing in the world. My pastor and my Sunday school teacher absolutely hated it, and told me not to come back to church wearing the earring. I was confused. My parents had told me the earring was okay, I liked it, my friends liked it, but I was told it was wrong and that God did not permit men to have piercings. I was upset for a day or two, but decided that the earring wasn't worth it.

When I was eleven, I went to grown-up service for my first time, and they were teaching the store of Adam and Eve. I listened intently, almost able to recite the story from memory, when something happened. What I was hearing from the pastor did not match with what I had been taught. I was always taught that Adam had eaten the fruit because he had seen that Eve had come to no harm, but what they were telling me was that Adam chose to eat the fruit on Eve's account. This absolutely shook me, an eleven-year-old, that had always been taught the Bible was the written word of God and only had one meaning. I left that church, and I found another one.

I loved my new church. They also had a bus, and they even took us on occasional trips to different amusement parks and we had church camp. I attended for around a year, and that's when I began to feel the tendencies. Sometimes I would look at the other boys as we dressed down in the locker room, and I began finding my way onto the internet. I asked my mom what homosexuality was and if God loved homosexuals. She simply said "homosexuals are an abomination to God".

After another year or so, the tendencies were getting stronger. I knew something was wrong, and I did everything I could to resist. This isn't right, I kept telling myself, am I broken? I prayed to God fervently nearly every day, but the feelings only got stronger. I tried finding people on the internet that would tell me how not be gay, and had no success. I tried and tried, and did my best to resist the urges, while reading my Bible and continuing to pray fervently to God. I can't recall how many times I "re-saved" myself, convinced that I just hadn't been properly saved. I got baptized, and still nothing could quell it.

All of this was destroying myself. I saw nothing but conflict in all facets of my life, convinced that, because things still weren't working, it was my fault. After all, God is perfect. I began rebuking myself, torturing myself over it, and overall just tearing little pieces away from myself one at a time in infinite succession, trying to convince myself that I could change. I withdrew from my friends, from my family, from my church. I did horribly in school, I was regarded as the loser, or the loner, and I was depressed. And this went on. For seven years.

I can't really say there was a singular turning point out of it all, one pivotal event that propelled me out a self-destructive cycle. A combination of things happened gradually over a period of time. I knew that I didn't want to feel that way anymore, I knew that I wanted to be comfortable with myself and understand what I could and couldn't change, I knew that I wanted to think for myself, and above all, I began to recognize that the dialogues I thought I was having with God were really just monologues. It was a painstaking process, but eventually I got to a point where I didn't hate myself when I woke up in the morning.

I look back, and the things I went through were horrific. I nearly destroyed myself emotionally. What I went through, nobody should have to go through. What I can say, though, is that it made me a stronger person. It's made me self-aware, as well as more aware of the world around me. It's given me a greater sense of value of my life. It's allowed me to think independently, unrestricted, able to make my own judgments, even if they're wrong, my OWN judgments, mistakes that I'm allowed to make instead of being confined into a dangerous mental space.

I finally rejected Christianity for myself when I was eighteen. I came out when I was nineteen. My parents don't approve on either account. I am now twenty-one, and there's still a lot of damage for me to undo, and still a lot of growing to do. One thing that's clear to me it's that I have a lot of work left. And I am absolutely sure that I am happier than I have ever been, even with all this disrepair, I know I'll make it, and I know that I'm strong enough to keep learning and expanding myself.

The following is a post from the blog (Why I No Longer Believe) that I've established to log my recent deconversion and the fallout thereof.

By Anthony Toohey ~

One of the difficult parts of the deconversion process is talking it through with the friends you’ve had for decades of shared Christian experience. These are friends you met and grew with wholly in the context of Christianity. Every conversation you had, every struggle you shared, every joy you delighted in was in the name of Jesus Christ. You understood that every good thing came from above. You understood that every bad thing was a means of testing, proving, correcting; driving you closer to the all-loving God of the universe. Even if you weren’t talking about God at all, there was always that mutual understanding of a shared faith. It was a trust connection from without that didn’t exist for people outside the faith.

Now, suddenly, that particular connection is severed. Not on my part, I would like to think. To me, the connection was only ever a human one anyway. Outside of the devotion to a biblical God, we could still carry on that depth of friendship and trust. After all, in our devotion to each other we’ve gotten to know the human behind the profession of faith. Aren’t we still the same people? Am I not every bit who I was a year ago when it all still seemed real to me?

But to my friends, it is severed. In their eyes I am cut off from the power and blessings of the Holy Spirit. It is not a question of an equal devotion to different philosophies. It is a deficient position, bereft of a spiritual rudder, one that prevents me from seeing the truth clearly, and therefore from making sound decisions.

To be open-minded and consider that one might be wrong is anathema to the Christian.To them, the existence of god, more specifically, a biblical, personal God, is understood – to the point in which you either believe in that god, or you are in willful denial to serve a selfish end. It’s not that you don’t believe, it’s that you deny believing what you know deep down is actually true. The related assumption is that there is some sort of sin you wish to indulge in and therefore deny and repress the spirit of god in order to pursue your indulgence in sin. One of the first online exchanges I had about leaving the fold included a poster whose willfully and openly arrogant question was, “So, what’s your favorite sin?”

So the conversation already starts off handicapped. I don’t mean that to say their position is deficient. I mean it to say we have a specific difference in a foundational understanding of the nature and existence of god. We are on different planes, trying to find a common ground. It is an understanding that will never wholly arrive, I’m certain. Not that we will be unable to be friends. I’m sure we will, but I will always be that friend who needs extra prayer, who needs god to somehow shake him up and bring him back to the flock, who they’re sure someday will come around.

I have had several of these ‘friend’ conversations. I felt it was important to see and speak to several of my closest friends. I wanted to make sure they heard it directly from me. I didn’t want them getting a fourth or fifth hand hearsay laced account of how I deconverted and had taken to roasting babies and puppies on the backyard grill. Also, I wanted to respect their place in my life, and the time and energy they had put into me over the years, and I back in them. Finally, I wanted to make sure they knew that, regardless of their response, I still loved them and considered them the dearest of friends.

One conversation I had with a friend I’ll call Titus. I’ve known Titus for most of my Christian life, over 20 years. By the time we had a chance to sit down he had an inkling that I had veered from the path. The conversation was concerned and loving, but it was also very strange. Over the years I’ve sat on his side of the table, listening to others tell my why they couldn’t believe. You pick up key phrases in these conversations. As a reasoning agnostic they mean one thing, usually something positive. As a Christian they are red flags.

One phrase that I used several times during this conversation was “Open myself up to,” as in, “I had to OPEN MYSELF UP TO other ideas.” After I had told my story, Titus keyed very quickly onto that phrase. To be open-minded and consider that one might be wrong is anathema to the Christian. To question God, his son, his word, one questions all that is real. To put reason on the same level as the Bible itself is blasphemous. Paul wrote: “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing,” and later in the same passage (I Corinthians 1:18-25), “Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?”

You can imagine how this destroys the ability of a Christian and non-Christian to dialogue about wisdom. He who reasons with his mind and considers the world as it is, without the filter of the bible, is already considered a fool, one who is perishing, and the very act of questioning the bible in contrast with worldly wisdom is itself evidence of one’s fallen state. It’s a non-starter. There can be no mutual understanding, no respect of the process, because the process wasn’t subordinated to the bible itself.

Of course, had it been, the conversation wouldn’t be taking place at all.

I explained to Titus that I would be more than happy to explore the issues in detail, but that it would be up to him, as I didn’t want to be the one casting doubts around for the heck of it. After the conversation we exchanged a couple of private messages on Facebook. He probed lightly around some of the things we talked about at first. Finally he said exactly what he was thinking. It was loving in its way, and it didn’t surprise me in the least, but it still… well, see for yourself: (unedited for grammar)

**I forwarded it to you via email. Easter presentation many many years ago. I believe it was in that presentation where you play the blind man … and when they asked “How is that you see?” Your line was something like “All I know is I was once was blind but now I see!!!” I truly believe with all my heart that you have been blinded once again bro! I hope you hear me in love. You were seeing! You were “touching the world” the world was lost. Through music and drama, through prayer and faith. And so what you’ve done in this search for truth is that you’ve opened yourself up to an enemy that you once believed in. He has duped you into believing there is no real God of the bible, He didn’t send His Son Jesus to be your Savior, and so if you don’t believe in that, than there’s is no reason to believe in satan. He has caused you to take all of your doubts and stock pile them, showing you them time and time again, adding to them, causing you to research and read and read and read, he had given you the list of top best sellers according to atheism, anti-God and anti-Christ. He has caused you to intellectualize right out of your faith which you held so dear at one point. “Lord God! Father and creator of the universe! Jesus! Son of The Living God! Open my brother’s eyes once more!!**

How am I to proceed? What else is there to say. He cannot begin to question, and therefore he cannot begin to understand my doubts. He cannot give them credence. Atheist writer and blogger John Loftus made an interesting observation recently. He said:

“[Christians] must be convinced their faith is impossible before they will consider it to be improbable…”

Christians cannot begin to question the bible and all they’ve been taught until they’re convinced they won’t be on the next train to hell by doing so. No wonder so few of us get across that bridge.

It’s not that I have any vested interest in Titus giving up his faith. Not at all. I would like him to simply treat me as his friend and respect what I believe as well. I don’t want to be his project.

I had been struggling to reconcile morality (as I knew it by observation and experience) with the moral code of the evangelical Christian culture I had always identified with. One big question for me: Why were evangelicals treating Paul’s condemnation of homosexuality as a moral absolute while casually dismissing other policies found in his letters – such as his prohibition on women opening their mouths in church? I had never really believed that Paul’s writings were inspired in any way; they had always struck me as the rants of an opinionated and conceited man who may have sincerely believed in Jesus but who spoke only for himself. The church’s waffling just reinforced that impression.

So I got curious about who else might be less than reverent toward Paul. I did a little web research and was amused to find that some Christian groups reject Paul outright on the grounds that he contradicts Jesus. (Example: http://www.liberalslikechrist.org/.)

That discovery made me wonder what else in my belief system might be ill-founded. Searching on the historicity of the gospels and the rest of the New Testament, I discovered “The Jesus Puzzle” by Earl Doherty – a well-argued book whose premises I found easy to verify. It demonstrated that the gospels and Acts were not firsthand accounts written by people who knew Jesus (although, by contrast, most of the Pauline letters were likely written by Paul); further, it presented a different “best possible explanation” of how those writings developed and (with other books) were adopted as the canon for most Christian sects.

My whole Christian faith had been based on the historicity of the gospels and Acts. Those books, for me, were the evidence of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, which in turn were the basis of the “salvation by faith” doctrine. Now those books were off the table, leaving me no basis for belief in any of the claims of Christianity.

To say I’ve become an atheist is to miss the point. Atheism is a conclusion, and conclusions are subject to revision based on new evidence. I don’t want or need to commit to the conclusion that there are no gods.

By contrast, skepticism – an insistence on rational inquiry, an insistence on testing claims by examining evidence – is something I can commit to indefinitely. And I am committing to it.

Intellectually, my ‘conversion’ has been a relief because there is no more conflict between what I ‘believe’ and what I observe. But my worldly troubles are just beginning: My ‘conversion’ will probably grieve my parents, at least one of my sons, and many other people I care about.

I would like to post the letter below if it is possible, maybe he will read it someday... or someone else will read it and they will reconize a friend trying to reach out.

My dearest friend,

When we met, you told me you where a Christian, I told you I had no god. I honestly never intended to deconvert you. Years passed, we accepted our differences. I saw you change slowly...questioning your faith, being dissatisfied with the answers your church and Christian friends would tell you. We enjoyed talking for endless hours about these questions: life, evolution, love, faith, travelling. They started to warn you against me...I never said a word against them. I never said anything against your faith. You still got more and more confused about your faith.

In your own words it slowly became clear: you could not believe anymore. We both knew it...you knew it. Your faith had become an unbearable burden.

Then, without warning you pushed me out of your life. You told me that I was bad for your relationship with jesus. In tears, you denied everything you ever told me about you questioning your faith. I suddenly became the only reason you are now confused. I know your friends have been warning you since we met that you will lose jesus because of me. You have been struggling and suffering for years now...same pattern. You isolate yourself.

For the first time I confronted you. I could not pretend anymore... I said out loud what you have been whispering in tears and writing in letters to me: you want to free your mind. Shutting me out of your life, will not make your faith come back...

You say I am bad for your faith, but you still write to me in distress about your pain...and if I answer...it backfires at me because people tell you it’s my fault you are in distress.

I will step out of your life even if you don’t want to let me go. People have been telling you what to think since you were born. I will not be one of them.

It is a hard thing to see someone we love torture themselves...and feel helpless.

I wish I could help you.
I wish I could make this fear of hell controlling you...go away.
I wish you would stop seeing yourself as a sinner.
I wish you would trust yourself and see how intelligent you are.
I wish you would embrace your free spirit and stop punishing yourself for asking questions.

I hope someday you will be at peace...because now you are in great pain.

Recently esteemed theologian "John Stott" tragically died in August and therefore some Christians are reverently depicting him as a positive force within a religion that is filled with some pretty wretched characters like "Jerry Falwell." Admirably, John Stott did represent a more healthier form of Christianity when opposed to the depravity of Jerry Falwell or that crazy Camping fellow. Except, John Stott also argued for acceptance of an idea of hell that supposedly presented God as more merciful than the merciless God that permits the torture of his own creation for eternity for not believing properly.

John Stott thus supported the more deceptively humane idea of "Annihilationism." For some reason, most people would think that the word "annihilate" connotes something sinister and evil. Except, John Stott presented the idea of "annihilationism" as the less barbaric concept of hell. Reasonably, the idea of perpetual torture for someone who could not believe in the Orthodox ideal was obscene and presents an obtuse God who fails to have any grasp of the idea of forgiveness. In John Stott's mind therefore, the majority of people who are destined for hell will not be consciously aware of torture because God literally sentences them to a "second death," which means that this person's life is obliterated along with any memory of them within their loved one's minds.

For proponents of this tamer idea of hell, the inhabitants of heaven who are fixed in their celestial bliss would not be able to inquire to God: "God, what happened to "so and so??" The tyrannical God made sure that the very existence of that person also eradicated the memory of that person which symbolically would have made them immortal in a sense. Of course, we should all feel our wealth of sadness become assuaged by this because those people whom we profoundly loved may be forgotten in heaven. In order for "God" to preserve the infinite state of heavenly bliss, he has to accordingly wipe out any emotive memory attached to that person who has been condemned to hell or the unfathomable idea of a "lost existence."

God who more often than naught acts more like a "sociopath" than some transcendent being [...] We need to stop accepting this deranged Hitler-God whom we permit to be monstrous just because we are so frightened by "the degenerate tyrant." Would God even forget these people in this concept of heaven? Isn't this malicious God much like Hitler in a sense? As long as these odd ideas of hell are predominant in Christian theology, God is very much "Hitler" albeit he is indubitably "perfect justice" therefore immorality within our eyes become morality as long as its "God" being the one to commit these acts. Some Christians believe they are lessening the inherent evil associated with this tyrannical "God." "But, God feels immense pathological sadness when he wipes people from existence altogether." Would we condone Hitler's cruelty just because he might have shed tears as he heard the harsh reverberations of piteous screams from Jews and those who were not members of the special race being incinerated in ovens? If Christians believe that God condemns those who are not Christians to hell, the six million Jews who were initially killed by the malevolent Hitler would then be wiped clean from existence?

I know some Christians like "C.S. Lewis" love to portray these people who are cosigned to hell as being people who are not contrite. Suddenly, this apathy about their torture justifies hell or makes it righteous in the minds of Christians who struggle with the immoral ramifications that these various hell concepts present. In our reality, morality dictates that torture of any kind cannot be warranted just because the person is not protesting against the torture. C.S. Lewis is definitely someone who would not be termed as unloving or someone with a cold heart. But, his concept of hell is fraught with moral problems. His justification for "hell" mirrors the ignorance of rape or sexual abuse because victims were thought to have felt pleasure from having forced sexual intercourse. Or, they were not pitied because they didn't even try to struggle against their rapist thus the fault lies with the "victim" because they succumbed far too easily. Except, we know that torture of any kind dehumanizes therefore people who are tortured are often "numb" or "lost" to themselves.

In my empathetic mind, I just cannot conjure this image of all people the people in hell being complacent with their punishment just because they hate God. Personally, I would hate this sort of God who might have permitted my life to be filled with incessant torture to the extent where I could not believe in the type of God who seems to be uncaring to people who just couldn't believe within him. It has been proven that kids who are sexually abused often have distrust in people and even God. How can God judge these people while being cruelly unaware of their tragic circumstances on this Earth?

None of us have any real notion of God. We have forced God to be some sovereign king who is infallible and odious? In life, we all are grappling with the search for meaning and love in a world that can often be filled with grief and pain. Why are we viewing God from that stoical state of mind that has no empathy or consideration for anyone but ourselves? In our mind, we feel worthy of being in heaven except those "others" who are undeserving of our high stature and ultimate reward in paradise. How did we allow such an awful idea of God be permitted to preached about? God is often someone that is "static" in the Christian mind of thus this skewed construct of God has become immutable in our senses. Paradoxically, we know nothing about this God but yet we pretend to know him better than the other people we share this Earth with. Our biggest problem is a deficit of love therefore we project that onto our "idea" of God who more often than naught acts more like a "sociopath" than some transcendent being that was "the prime mover" and the greatest enigma in our universe. We need to stop accepting this deranged Hitler-God whom we permit to be monstrous just because we are so frightened by "the degenerate tyrant," that we cannot and refuse to believe in a God whom might be the antithesis of all our crude ideas of "God."

So glad to find a site like this! My own aversion to Christianity begins like this:

Jesus ruined my life when I was eleven years old...

My two brothers went to a mixed senior school which happened to be a Church of England school, where they had an enjoyable time and did very well - the elder of the two went on to Cambridge. Consequently, it was decided that I should follow in their footsteps by attending the same school when I was old enough. We applied and I was offered a place, which we accepted. Then, before I joined the school, they had a change of headmaster. The new headmaster overturned the decision to accept me because I was not a practising Christian (ie. I did not attend Sunday school or blow a trumpet in the boy's brigade etc.). He rejected me even though I had already been accepted by his predecessor. But my brothers are not Christians either. This left me with no secondary school to go to and, because it was late in the school year, most over decent schools were full! Eventually, after much telephoning by my mother, I was offered a place at a local boys' school.

I am unhappy today because I was not allowed to go to the right sort of school for me - a mixed school. All-male schools are not right for everyone. I would have been happier and I would have performed better in a mixed-sex environment. I could have gone to a top university and achieved much more in life. I also feel that I have missed out on all the milestones of youth.

All this happened to me because of the whim of some religious moron who thought that by ruining the life of a young lad whom he did not even know, he was somehow doing God's will. Religion just turns people into idiots. It makes people arrogant and over-opinionated. That man - a Reverend, of all things! - casually ruined my educaton on a whim, on the most ridiculous piece of nonsense I have ever heard.

My parents are Evangelical Christians, both converted when they were around 20. They met at the same church, and Mum asked Dad to marry her because she believed God told her she should.

So from the very beginning, my whole existence was predicated by these few events. I exist because of Evangelical Christianity.

I grew up in a Born-again household. There were four kids, and we were pretty much like any family. Except we read the bible every night after dinner, and went to church every Sunday. But along with that, every single decision, every action that occurred withing our home was based on the dogma of Evangelical Christianity.

So from a young age, I was imprinted with these ideas. I didn't get a choice. Church services designed to play on your emotions, the excitement of worship, the mystery of the gifts of the spirit, praying in tongues. And the emotion of fear.

The whole premise of this belief structure is fear. Fear of hell. Apart from being incredibly frightening, it's also incredibly transparent.

The whole premise of this belief structure is fear. Fear of hell.I think I was around 12 when I started really questioning the things I was supposed to believe. I was always the one asking questions, testing things, applying logic to other people's ideas and looking for empirical evidence.

Questioning something as big as your belief when you're a kid is not easy. I was terrified. During the beginning of this, well, I guess it was a journey, as much as I dislike using that word, I honestly thought I was going to hell.

But then, I also had a brain. I would sit there in church, while everyone was praying in tongues, and just watch them. I felt like I was the only sensible one in the room. One Sunday, it was as clear to me as day. Outside of all the words, the emotional urging of the music, the swelling voices and earnest prayer, there was nothing. Nothing to base a belief on. Nothing but the words of other people.

It was during those years that the lesson of the kids' story 'The Emperor's New Clothes' become the foundation for my new understanding of Christianity. In the story, the child is the only one brave enough to actually say the Emperor was naked. Everyone else was too frightened.

There is no rational basis for Christianity. And I knew that, but it took a long time to untangle myself from that web of fear and guilt. I was 19 when I finally told my parents I didn't; couldn't believe a single thread of the story.

And it is a story. It was a story designed to make sense of the world in a time before science existed. It's purpose was to guide and inform the way people interacted in society. And also, it was a story used to control society.

I used to be very angry. Angry that my parents had forced this upon me. But I now think if I didn't have that brainwashing force to push against during my formative years, I may not have developed this appetite for critical thought, which I really enjoy.

I will not engage with Christians in discussion about their religion. They base all their arguments on the Bible. To engage, you need to accept their book as truth. Which is difficult, as the basic tenets of Christianity are both things which transgress the physical laws of nature, and which are impossible to prove.

Christians rely on the reverse argument; that these things are impossible to disprove. But that is nonsense. Science is clear about this point. So for a Christian to believe, they must take a leap of faith. In other words, ignore science.

My belief from a very young age is that it's madness to base your entire life on something you can't prove, and on events that are physically impossible. It's really that simple. Every other aspect of Christianity, all the rituals, all the guilt, fear and dogma is based on this simple lie.

I am so grateful to my parents for giving me a happy, loving childhood, and for my life. But this life is mine. And I am so glad I took it back.

Every society has judges and tribunals to mete out justice. The World Court was established by nations for the purpose of trying and bringing to justice those guilty of crimes against humanity. Our societies demand justice. Indeed, to be HUMAN is to clamor for justice. One universally accepted law is that a murderer must pay a severe price for taking another’s life.

With this in mind, one can understand the outrage that ensues whenever a mistrial is declared or a verdict is rendered in favor of the accused for lack of compelling evidence. The usual cry goes up from those convinced of his guilt is that he "has gotten away with it." Every Christian I have spoken to on this subject has the same basic response for this verdict: "Some day he will answer to God," or, "God will get him in the end, so he will NOT get away with it."

God is, after all, to the believers, the ultimate Judge, therefore justice WILL prevail. And they find satisfaction in their rationalized answer. How simple and how "obvious" that answer is! Don‘t trouble yourself, you did all you could to bring the perpetrator to justice, and failed, but God will get him. There is no need to revenge the victim(s), or to wallow in impotent rage . . . we offer this comfort and closure to the bereaved. The all-just Deity will judge and punish with ETERNAL torture the rapists, serial killers, murderous dictators, kidnappers, and murderers of children (unless they repent of course), who have escaped justice on earth.

The source of those beliefs is the bible of the three Abrahamic religions. The Judge of that book is detailed in his character and morals. The attitude of that Deity to humankind is expressly stated in many ways; after all, it is a book of moral instruction and example. Of what nature is this morality? We read in the book of Genesis that God says, after the Great Flood, “I will NEVER AGAIN curse the ground because of humankind, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth." Note that the innocent children, animals, and plants are destroyed, annihilated, because of the "guilty,“ which guilt is never described. This is the typical judgment policy of this Deity, enacted directly or through his agents: there is no trial, no arguments pro and con for the guilt or innocence of the accused. There is only the post-flood assurance of, ‘I made a mistake, but you're all inclined to evil anyhow, so why should I bother doing it again?’

There are serious problems with this Judge. He ought to be disbarred, but who shall do it? Consider that not everyone is evil, that this has never been so, that we humans have always been a mixture of good and bad spread across the spectrum of moral landscapes. It is against the very definition of "justice“ to punish the innocent for the crimes of the guilty. This judge is prejudiced, narrow-minded, unfair, dangerous, and a murderer. And coming back afterwards to reassure the scraps of survivors that he will never do it again (at least by flood), is horrible. After all, he committed mass extinction without warning, without providing opportunity for the victims to change their ways to whatever he wanted.

After this, who can trust him? All of the things we know about human nature that the Deity SHOULD HAVE known, he had to wait until after mass destruction to discover? THIS is a PERFECT God? This is a Perfect Judge, to whom we must all answer?

Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and God is absolutely powerful, so what else should we expect? But the scriptures ignore this. They insist that this Judge is to be worshiped in spite of countless examples of his people, following his example and instructions, committing genocide repeatedly. In the justice of God, there are NO human rights. The Holy One is by belief and tradition unchallengeable, unquestionable, untouchable, and ultimate perfection. (And, above all, unreachable.)

By any truly just and reasonable standard, the Deity is the enemy, the antithesis of all that is just and merciful. And those who maintain and teach children that this God is "perfect" should examine his or her conscience and sense of morality, for what I have written here is fully supported in the stories of the bible. This Godly "perfection" is that of a mass-murderer, a dictatorial perpetrator of crimes against humanity more than any other before or since.

A "merciful" God? If an eternal torment in a hell created by an all-loving heavenly father can exist, then where is the "mercy which endures forever" attribute of this God? EVIL is as evil does. Actions speak louder than words . . . or beliefs.

And JUSTICE? If the faithful believe truly that an ultimate judge will prevail, then WHO will be that judge? WHO will take this evidence of scripture, together with verifiable evidence by the ton, over centuries, of the atrocities committed by the servants of this Deity with his permission and by his instruction, and bring him to justice? Who is to judge God, if not us?

If The Flood was TRULY a MORAL decision and action, then we humans have no real understanding of morality, my friend tells me. And, if God’s stand on human rights is that humans have none with him is morality at its highest, then anything goes. My friend also once asked me, "Just what is the moral of the Flood story?" Well, this is my answer.

On reading an early draft of Trusting Doubt, which looks at my old Evangelical beliefs from my current vantage as a nontheist, one reviewer commented, “This is a very spiritual book.”

What?! I thought. A part of me protested: I don’t believe in the Christian God any more, or for that matter any kind of humanoid god or for that matter any kind of supernaturalism. I’m not allowed to call myself spiritual. But another part of me kind of liked the label, even though I was startled by it. I tried it on for size. What would it mean for me, a freethinker, to think of myself as spiritual? What is spirituality if you scrub away the woo and soak any potential regrowth in a strong solution of reason and evidence?

Some nontheists argue that the idea of spirituality is too bound up with religion to be of any use to us who have left religion behind. Front and center are philosophical problems brought up by the term “spirit.” Religions typically espouse one or another type of dualism—a faith-based idea that some form of consciousness-aka-spirit exists independent of our bodies and brains, rather than being emergent from them. Many forms of belief, like American Pentecostalism, go on to elaborate a whole realm of spiritual beings engaged in quasi-human affairs, including battles of good guys against bad guys, minus the substance of this physical world. (Cognitive scientists now suspect our tendency toward dualism to be an artifact of the way our minds process information—with separate hardwired subroutines for processing information about sentient persons and about physical objects including bodies.)

Then, besides the philosophical problem, there’s the social problem: As soon as you start talking about spirituality, even outside the bounds of traditional belief systems, people assume you are open to new forms of unsubstantiated and un-falsifiable ideas. You risk being proselytized, or scorned by skeptics, or ending up at a dinner party with Tim Minchen and Storm, and being seated on the Storm side of the table.

And yet . . . And yet, despite all, it is also our most understandable, most resonant way of referring to a dimension of life that is way too important to cede to white haired men in white collars and hippies with fairies on their derrieres. I’m talking about this: the profound sense that we are a part of something bigger than ourselves; the delight of reveling in the grand mysteries that lie beyond the bounds of our knowledge; the sense that some things are deeply, unspeakably sacred and others are deeply, unspeakably wrong; the yearning to have our lives matter, or as Steve Jobs put it, “to leave a dent in the universe.”

Most nontheists are former believers. We’ve heard words like spirit and even love and joy and forgiveness and goodness bandied about until they become common, or twisted into Orwellian forms (loving kids means spanking them; forgiveness demands blood sacrifice; eternal punishment for temporal sins is good) to the point that many of us are wary of any thing that sounds remotely like whatever kind of church-talk we used to trust too much. So, one challenge in reclaiming these words and the underlying concepts is figuring out how to claim them in a way that allows us to access their power without the old associations. I have found that at least one part of the solution is simply pushing yourself over the hump. The more you use words like these in your own way, in your own context, the more they take useful shapes. The old associations become background as new ones get formed.

Why bother? To truly move beyond religion we need to engage in a process that will let us refine new answers to some of life’s big questions. But absent the traditional vocabulary of spirituality, we are left without words with which to express deep existential questions and answers to each other or even to ourselves. That can leave us personally impoverished. It can also leave us isolated, because honest religious modernists who cherish what I am calling the spiritual dimension of life look for bridges into our community and fail to find them. Lastly, without a spiritual vocabulary we end up sounding hyper rational (and hyper boring) in conversations ranging from kitchen table banter to public policy debates. We face theists who speak from the heart, tapping the most powerful emotions known to humankind, while we limit ourselves to words and clauses that work in college essays.

Religion and morality are bound together, and parallel to the challenge of articulating a genuinely secular spirituality is the challenge of articulating secular morality. Embracing spirituality requires that secularists cast off the cloak of post-modern relativism (anything goes; it’s all good) and re-engage in humanity’s multi-millenial argument about what is right and wrong, about what ultimately is worth fighting for and worth dying for. If some things are good, some things are bad. If some things are precious, some are evil. I couldn’t write this paragraph without using words (evil, moral, right and wrong) that are considered by many folks to be the exclusive property of religion.

But should they be?

We now know that the moral dimension of human life derives not from religion but from our need, as social animals, to cooperate and live in community with each other. We are social information specialists; that is our ecological niche, and a solitary human is a pretty sorry creature. That is why altruistic instincts and emotions like empathy, shame, and guilt emerge early in child development in every culture around the world. Religion may provide justification for our moral impulses, but the building blocks are innate.

On top of that, there has been a clear trend across millennia toward increased cooperation among humans, a move away from vengeance toward mutual respect and dignity, with a corresponding evolution away from authoritarian structures toward pluralism and open inquiry. As humanity’s moral consciousness evolves toward more sophisticated cooperation and decreased violence, iron-age religious texts and traditions pull people in the opposite direction, anchoring believers to a time when murder rates were fifty times what they are now, when women and children were chattel, literally, and righteous slaves were admonished to serve their masters with due humility. Old-time religion is becoming the opposite of moral. It’s anti-moral. I’ll say it: Immoral.

We face theists who speak from the heart, tapping the most powerful emotions known to humankind, while we limit ourselves to words and clauses that work in college essays. And yet, think about it. When was the last time you used the word evil during an impassioned outburst of moral indignation? The Church has no problem calling you evil: your rejection of belief is evil; your sexual intimacies (if they are outside of marriage or queer or done for pleasure) are evil; your decisions to regulate your childbearing using modern methods are evil. But how many times have you used the word evil to describe the untold suffering the Church imposes on impoverished families denied contraception; or the lies told to protect belief; or the propaganda that turns resource wars into holy wars; or the specter of kind-faced volunteers threatening kindergarteners with hell?

For those of us who are avowedly secular to claim the power of moral and spiritual language requires that we define our terms and then dive into a vigorous debate, first with each other and then with the world around us. Religionists have been doing so for centuries. (If you believe in the power of natural selection, then you have to believe that the arguments of religionists have been refined by one of the most powerful polishing processes known to humankind.)

When it comes to joining the moral fray, Sam Harris launched an impressive opening salvo in the first few chapters of The Moral Landscape, in which he asserts that we can talk about prescriptive morality – should and should nots – without any need for divine revelation. Harris makes a very simple argument: We know that there are sentient creatures who have varying degrees of wellbeing, and we can make decisions that increase that well-being – or, on the contrary, increase suffering. This alone provides the starting point for a science of morality grounded in evidence and reason. Tim Killian at moreperfect.org takes this a step further. He says that Harris’s arguments become even clearer and stronger when we move out of the abstract realm of ethical philosophy and into the realm of public policy.

All of which is to say, the time may be ready--not just for us to try on the ancient moral words, but to start wielding them.

Ultimately, though, it is what I would call the spiritual dimension that makes the moral argument worth having. We have to decide what matters, what really matters, before we can measure our individual and collective behavior against that standard. We have to know what the land of milk and honey looks like before we can figure out if we are getting there. I used the word “know” but really I should have said, “decide” because in the end, defining the spiritual realm is really about reaching a set of collective agreements. The old way of doing it was to take a set of emergent hypotheses, a set of stories and precepts and intuitions that could be distilled out of the swirl of culture and mythos, and then put the name of God on them. “God said, God wants us to, God is speaking, God told Sarah Palin . . . .”

But the reality always has been more like the Ouija board we played with at childhood slumber parties. It was just us, and we kind of knew it, but it gave us chills all the same. (And some of us believed.) As a species, we never have been channeling anyone but ourselves. But for God’s sake, there is a lot of power in that! We live in the age of nukes and smart phones, and the “spirits” channeled by Middle-Eastern prophets (and the Middle-Eastern prophets channeled by modern self-anointed holy men) are still influencing who we kill and how many babies we have. Channeling our collective selves, whether through prophets or congregations or wikis is a part of how we leave a dent in the universe. Now that we know that doesn’t mean we have to stop.

I say let’s claim spiritual and moral language – not in the way that some believers use old words to create ambiguity --let’s all use the word “God” and then pretend we’re talking about the same thing—but to say exactly what we mean. Nontheists are as yet a small minority of humankind. Most of us have thought deeply about what it means to be human—to live well and die well. Many of us have devoted our lives to leaving this world more compassionate, or pursuing humanity's age old quest for truth, or protecting the sacred web that gave us birth. Our experience of love and wonder sustains us. Why should we go through life wearing muzzles that we ourselves have tied on?

I am not angry as I emerge from the debris of a super-fundamental Pentecostal charismatic Word of Faith life. The main reason for my lack of anger, I think, is that I can’t blame anyone but myself for staying tied up in this mindset as long as I did.

Surfing ex-christian.net today I stumbled upon http://www.ex-christian.net/topic/21830-phases-of-deconversion/, in which “Hammurabi” articulates commonly observed phases in deconversions posted on this site. Being acquainted with the transtheoretical (stages of change) model, Kubler-Ross’s stages of grief, and my own experience in deconversion, I was curious about Hammurabi’s perceptions on the phases of deconversion. Phase 4, according to this theory, is anger. What concerns me, and has for some time, is my apparent lack of anger as I emerge from fundy-land. Is my anger perhaps niggling just under the surface, like an abscess waiting to explode? Do I have an unresolved anger problem that I’m burying, to the detriment of my health?

Is anyone else worried about this potential problem?

I do have a history of anger. Growing up female in a fundy family, free-thought and anger were the two cardinal sins in our household. As a young adult I was accused of being “mad at God”, which to me seemed like a horrible thing. Looking back, I was angry because it seemed that the one true male God hated females and had no place for us in the Kingdom. Women in my church weren’t even allowed to vote in church matters or serve communion. This felt wrong and yet I felt powerless to act, because those simply were the rules that God had made. In my thirties I came to a crisis of faith. The cognitive dissonance by this time was roaring in my head with the volume of a jet engine at close range. My experiences and observations were not aligning with what I believed and read in my Bible. During this time another friend told me I was angry because I expected something from God, and God is no maker of deals and owes us nothing, so pony up the attitude. This was confusing to me because what I read in my Bible is that he was more generous than the most loving human parent. Are there not some expectations to be had?

So, I am acquainted with anger. I have come to believe that anger is a healthy emotion that occurs when personal boundaries are encroached upon and/or expectations not met. In the midst of my crisis of faith, when I was still a believer, I started to ask myself, “Is it not possible that I am pissed off because something is wrong?” I began to wonder if I shouldn’t just deal with the dissonance and anger head on. And that’s what I did, and I am finally at peace.

All this to say, I realize that I would be justifiable in my anger towards former ‘prophets’, woo woos, house group leaders, and pastors. I could be angry at my family and friends for not trying to save me from a cataclysmic charismatic catastrophe—they did try, but I wouldn’t hear of it because I was acting on special revealed knowledge (God had a special plan for my life!). I can’t be angry at the nut-jobs that led me astray—they too were led astray; we all fell into the same delusional vortex called “faith”. And at the end of the day, I made the best decisions I could with (what I thought was) the best available evidence. I still feel pangs of regret at my losses, but it sure made sense back then. I really thought I was onto something.

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